Post-ACL Update

Thank you to our speakers, attendees, authors, reviewers, sponsors, and to everyone else who helped make WOAH 2023 such a fun and successful event. We hope to see you all again next year!

If you would like to access the slides from the invited talks and lightning talks, you can find them here.

Overview

The 7th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) is taking place on Thursday, July 13th 2023, as part of ACL 2023 in Toronto. Join us in person from 9am in Pier 7 & 8 or watch online using this link.

The special theme for this year is subjectivity and disagreement in abusive language data. We have a great line-up of invited speakers to discuss the theme. There will also be a poster session, lightning talks from remote attendants, outstanding paper awards and a panel discussion. After the workshop, all attendees are invited to join for workshop drinks.

For more details, read on below!

Invited Speakers

Su Lin Blodgett is a Senior Researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE) group at Microsoft Research Montréal. She is broadly interested in examining the social and ethical implications of natural language processing technologies.

Dirk Hovy is an Associate Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. He is interested in modeling what language can tell us about society, and what computers can tell us about language. He also works on ethics and fairness in NLP and AI.

Lauren Klein is a Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the Departments of Quantitative Theory and Methods and English at Emory University. She works at the intersection of data, AI, and the humanities, with an emphasis on questions of gender and race.

Vinodkumar Prabhakaran is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research, and holds a Research Affiliate position at the Stanford SPARQ institute. He works on employing NLP techniques for socially beneficial applications, as well as investigating (and mitigating) ethical and fairness failures in NLP models.

Maarten Sap is an assistant professor at CMU’s LTI department, and a part-time research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). His research focuses on endowing NLP systems with social intelligence and social commonsense, and understanding social inequality and bias in language.

Schedule

Thursday, July 13th 2023. Toronto time. All sessions are in Pier 7 & 8 unless indicated otherwise.

09:00 - 09:15: Opening Remarks

09:15 - 09:45: Dirk Hovy: “Whose Truth Is It Anyway?”

09:45 - 10:15: Vinodkumar Prabhakaran: Culture as a Lens on Offensive Language

10:15 - 11:45: Poster Session in the Frontenac Ballroom (see here for details)

11:45 - 12:15: Maarten Sap: “The Pivotal Role of Social Context in Toxic Language Detection”

12:15 - 13:30: Lunch Break

13:30 - 14:00: Su Lin Blodgett:

14:00 - 14:30: Outstanding Paper Talks (see here for details)

14:30 - 15:00: Lightning Talks for remote attendants (see here for details)

15:00 - 15:30: Lauren Klein: “Historical Data, Real-World Harms”

15:30 - 16:15: Coffee Break

16:15 - 17:15: Panel Discussion with all invited speakers on subjectivity and disagreement in abusive language data

17:15 - 17:25: Closing Remarks

From 17:30: Workshop Drinks, location TBA

Organisers

• Paul Röttger, Bocconi University

• Yi-Ling Chung, The Alan Turing Institute

• Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Google Research

• Debora Nozza, Bocconi University

• Zeerak Talat, Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University

Sponsors

WOAH is grateful for support from the following sponsors:

Diamond Tier

Gold Tier

Contact

If you have any questions, please get in touch at organizers@workshopononlineabuse.com